Blog

Wedding Season

Here we are, midway through the summer and in the heart of wedding season. It’s a great time to spend with family and friends, celebrating one of the greatest joys in life. Take a moment to look back on the first year of your own marriage. There are quite a few big changes in your life, right? Buying your first house together, taking your first vacations as a married couple, and who keeps leaving the cap off the toothpaste, just to name a few. With all the exciting new things you do together, there are also a lot of stresses in that first year, especially when it comes to your finances.

You are combining incomes for the first time, sharing bills, and most likely paying down student loans together. On top of all of this, you probably don’t share the same spending and saving habits as your new marriage partner. It can quickly become one of the biggest issues you will face throughout your marriage together. How many times have you found yourself struggling to voice your concern to your partner, without sounding like a mean parent trying to ruin their fun? It’s important to keep communication paths open regarding your finances as a couple. We are so used to only having to worry about ourselves before we get married, that it can be a struggle to manage combining your financial lives. Where do you even begin?

A great place to start is with your budget. Creating a simple budget together can set your married relationship off on the right foot. Sit down together and lay it all out there. Where do you spend most of your money month to month? How much debt do you currently have? What’s your personal splurge item? It’s important each person understands how the other views money in their lives. It’s alright to have differing views, in fact, that can lead to some of the best outcomes down the road. Combining those views can help break one another from poor habits or aversions that could hinder our financial success later in life. This isn’t the easiest conversation to have and it may take a few times of sitting down together to work through truly understanding one another. This is a great time to bring in a professional to help guide that conversation down the right path.

So this wedding season, while you are enjoying your time connecting with your family and friends at that beautiful wedding, I challenge you to reflect on your own marriage and relationships. What obstacles did you face in those first few years? Where did you turn to get help? What do you wish you would have known to make things a little easier on each other? Share those with the newly married couple. As their friends and family, we have a duty to help make their marriage as successful as possible. When you are thinking about what gift to give from their registry, consider how impactful it could be to the married couple to help them find time with a trusted advisor . Contact Indy Wealth Solutions to begin the introduction.